Locked Legacy
by Sirk
Summary: Calvin rediscovers his potential, the potential of his past lineage, and how much faith his predecessors had in him.


Calvin and Hobbes are property of Bill Watterson.  
  
Author's Comments:  
  
If the paragraphs screw up and aren't presented right, save yourself the trouble and don't read it until it's fixed. Either way it will be up again at Calvin and Hobbes at Martijn's, an excellent site of which I am too lazy to look up the URL for.  
  
I don't care about flames, go ahead and do it. I've have them before, I don't care, and people who think that other people will have mercy because its his/her first story are screwed.  
  
I never changed the form of the text in any of my stories before, so I'm not sure if it will work this time. So you may see some odd symbols surrounding B's that may also seem to have no purpose.  
  
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Another typical Saturday. Unlike most Saturdays, though, boredom ran through my veins, a constant reminder that my life lacked the possibility of anything interesting ever happening. Mom's monthly rant of how unfit-for- life and undeserving-of-her-eyes my room began today, making life all the less tolerable. Cleaning commenced, and my slaving began.  
"Young man, you are going to clean up every comic book on your floor! Afterwards you can start picking up your laundry, and--"  
Her voice tore against my ear, a shriek of sorts, that carried on continuously; one characteristic I did not approve of for my---or even a sufficient---mom. Still, she had a forceful tone and a nice sharp pair of cleats; the latter of which I truly feared.  
"Calvin, I don't hear you picking anything up! If you don't start cleaning I'm going to come up there!"  
A rugged, frustrated sigh, similar to a growl, ran down my throat as I laid my Captain Napalm comic book down on the ground. Realizing that this only added to my extra work, I sighed again in my most unpleasant fashion, picked it up, and began.  
Working had never been a particular skill of mine, but mom's footwear did have a way of getting through to me. I picked up every comic I could in my room, every few comics commenting about how little Mom cared for me over my slave labor use. Many of the comics were crumpled and torn, signs that Hobbes had slept there in the only spot the sun could reach. Mustaches littered across the pages were also marks of Hobbes' presence, another constant reminder that my comic books needed safer storage, as much as it pained me to agree with Mom. Other comic books were fused to the ground with a sticky, permanent paste-like mixture of milk and other drinks of mine that only ranked slightly above edible. After realizing that only a third of my comics were intact enough to actually be worth reading anymore, I gave up on my comic book cleaning.  
Picking up clothes was potentially worse than the comic books, as a slow and gradual buildup had added another layer of them to my floor, rising a foot above its surface. Clothes I didn't even remember I had covered the carpeted room where I was too lazy to pick up in my previous monthly cleanings, but Mom's force implied that she wasn't going to take any trash from me. Hobbes had another hour in the washer at the least, plus another one provided for him in the drier and several extra minutes to gain consciousness that he was back in reality; the dryer always twisted his mind and dulled his senses.  
Hours passed by in what seemed years, with Mom's elite hearing watching over me without any eyesight-related supervision whatsoever, taunting my own abilities to cause mischief and not be caught. Either way I got what I needed to be done, and in the long run, say twenty years, it probably would help. But for now, Mom's punishment of instilling upon me the concept of 'work' gave me hell, and finally getting done was a relief equal to winning the lottery.  
I crept down the stairs in a stealthy manner because, although Mom said that was all that my room needed as far as cleaning went (She questioned my sense of room decoration and fashion more than once), I knew Mom well enough that the concept of honesty couldn't beat her concept of play-cruel-on-the-Calvin-by-giving-him-a-last-minute-chore.  
"Calvin?"  
I froze. Alas, I was too right. She had only another 'favor' of me to ask, then, for the love of God, maybe she would give me an ounce of slack. ".Yeeess.?"  
"Calvin, your father left something up in your room, after we moved downstairs and gave you the top floor. It's in a little white box, on the top shelf of your closet. I need it for our anniversary tomorrow."  
A rather relieved, anticlimactic sigh ran down my throat. My closet was small enough, and, if it was in the front of all the junk gathered there, I wouldn't have any trouble-  
"It's in the back, jammed somewhere between all those presents your grandmother gave you. Be a dear and get it quick, will you."  
Ah, of course. Leave it to Mom to add to my misery, taking away the single happiest moment of my whole day, i.e. my cleaning time. Grandma had a plethora of gifts to send me, and a wallet that had enough money to repay the national debt of a small, third world country, and no known bottom to date. Never thought her myriad of gifts would turn against me in my final, topping chore of the day. Not all of them were hers, of course. Mom and Dad used to live upstairs, and were too lazy to bring all of their belongings down when they had me, their infamous terror, and decided the room was fit for my poor cleaning habits. This was sufficient reason to suspect that they had painted all of the boxes white just to see the look on my face when I discovered the concept of work, and more importantly when my asked me to get one box out of about a thousand identical ones.  
I mumbled as many words as I could on my trip up to my room, hoping at least a decent amount of them were vulgar at all. Upon opening my closet to see what it was Mom felt like me retrieving for her an avalanche of white boxes, all good candidates for what Mom wanted, poured out. I almost expected Mom to shout for the noise, but then I remembered that such disturbances in our house were routine for her.  
Every one of them looked the same, save maybe two or three out of the hundreds that had been torn apart by various other object pushing against them and definitely weren't suitable as per her anniversary expectations. Unable to decide which one was fitting of Mom's specifications, I just picked one out of the multitudes that looked good enough and brought it down.  
"No Calvin, bigger. It's a long rectangular box with duct tape all over it. Go look again."  
That small ball of rage that I had packed together from various events involving Susie, Moe, Miss Wormwood, and the like was nearing explosion, but fortunately common sense kicked in and I stormed back upstairs with no comments.  
Eventually I came to the parcel Mom had requested; long, rectangular, covered with enough duct tape to immobilize an elephant, it matched her description perfectly. I brought it down to Mom, again, but only got the same monotonous reply:  
"Go back up and look harder, that's not it."  
My patience had worn thin. What did she want? While my childhood theories of her true sadistic conspiracies were reassuring, I was equally reassured that she wouldn't pull anything below legal; I was a kid, and charges against the likes of me were not a wise choice for someone five times my age. Too angry to put it back in my hill of other forgotten packages, I dropped it on my desk and began burrowing through the boxes again. I picked up one with less but adequate duct tape, almost tearing it apart with rage-fueled hands, and brought it down for inspection.  
"Finally, Calvin. Next time just work a little harder and maybe you'll get some time to yourself."  
Another batch of less-than-motivating lines by her majesty. Having done my work, I returned to my room that dull, Saturday evening (Time sure passes when you're being tortured); Hobbes still had about twenty minutes in the dryer. My room was still cluttered enough for Mom to return, God forbid, so I kept my voice down so as not to attract her attention. Not that there was anything else to do; too dark to do anything outside and the only thing inside was my homework.  
Ah well, at least this time I would get a passing grade on one of my assignments. I pulled myself up from my bed and dragged myself to my bland, square desk, packed to its max with various assignments from semesters ago that I hadn't bothered to turn in.  
The box was still on my desk. Seemed I hadn't bothered to put it back up with all the other junk gathered in the hill of boxes; no surprise there, I wasn't going to tear my already weakened and thus fragile leg muscles just to make Mom smile once today. It was more. inviting than the other packages, with about an inch of semi-clear tape wrapped around it. Obeying my simple human nature unguarded by what should have been my will to concentrate on my far more important schoolwork, I took a nearby pair of scissors and started to hack away at its tape-encrusted carapace.  
It looked about half as hard as it was to open. The tape couldn't have been less than a decade old, having been fused to each other strand of tape. I gave up on the scissors and took out a small pocketknife I had 'borrowed' from Dad during our last trip of misery, vacation number two. After much effort I finally cut a small slit in it open, using my hands to tear the rest apart in seconds.  
I had originally believed that the contents of this typical, run-of- the-mill box would be nothing more than a mere leftover from one of my parents' previous celebrations, but other instincts, more reliable than I knew then, had told me that there was something more. They were right; inside was a roll of paper covering something that shined enough to stand out in my unlit room. Removing the old roll of paper, it slowly revealed itself to me.  
It was a key, decorated with unique drawings that looked like some sort of relic. Colored pieces of rock, crudely resembling people holding hands, were fused within the large handle at the end of the key. However, the most interesting feature of the key was its teeth. Small extensions of metal that stretched around in a fashion similar to a tentacle-dozens of them reaching out from the peak of the key's brass-colored bar-made me contemplate how such a design could be used for a keyhole anyway, or if it was of purely ornamental purposes.  
Finally the reaction hit me; this thing could be really rare. It had been wrapped in layers of tape, hidden in my closet for who-knows-how-long. Yet even more so it had an effect on me, one I couldn't understand myself. The excitation of finding a key like this wasn't the only thing that interested me, and such a find shouldn't really have interested me at all; keys weren't exactly my idea of treasure, though they appealed to almost everyone else. But this one had already affected me.  
Then I saw the paper I had carelessly tossed to the side. It's color had faded from coffee stains and other natural occurrences which hindered its liability. It was written in a very shaken and wavy script, the kind only a few among all the literate persons of the world could translate with full proficiency. It went something like this:  
  
For the Possessor of this Key:  
  
You have been endowed with a mystery I never could solve. You may unlock whatever it is this key possesses, as this burden no longer serves a purpose for myself.  
  
As soon as I read the passage, I started over. My interest in it now, which minutes ago was naught, now was boundless, and the chance that it could wane was an impossibility. Every time I took my eyes off the paper they were instantly pulled back to the key. Like some drug-induced world, seeing the key affected my thought and impaired my concentration on all other aspects of my room; when I looked at the key, it was all the world to me, Calvin, its new possessor.  
The letter attached befuddled me more than the key, as its reference to the key did not match a key's traditional purpose. The paper never once said anything about an actual, physical lock, instead referring to it as a burden, like some sort of plague its predecessor had wanted to rid himself of. Theories about its other potential purposes arose in my head; the key had such affect on my morale, did it have the same on its former user? If it did, then maybe what the key could 'unlock' was in actuality a more perfected mindset.  
I did not have time to think any longer. Hobbes' drying time had apparently finish; I or anyone else who had known him for even just an hour could distinguish his signature style of walking, mainly featuring his claws beating against the carpet covering my stairway, creating a muffled, padded sound. This was one of his prime characteristics that peeved him, since it encumbered him in his hunting, his favorite activity all day every day; this did not bother me as I was his main target.  
As soon as I heard him walk up to the second-to-last step of my stairway, some unknown force spoke to me: hide the key. Such mental imperatives only came in occasions like smacking Susie upside the head with a snowball or standing up for myself when Miss Wormwood gave me a well- deserved 'F'. I obeyed it anyway because, on the off-chance that it really was God speaking to me, he'd be pretty ticked if I didn't listen to Him, as He demonstrated so many times before, like the previously said happenstances. Normally, 'secrets' that I found first I would share with Hobbes, just for the sake of having someone know, but now my invisible commands forbid it. So I shoved the key and its associated letter with it back into the box and shoved it under my bed.  
  
"Calvin?"  
"Huh?"  
Hobbes had already entered the room while I was disposing of any evidence left for the key. "What are you doing?"  
"I'm. uh. checking for monsters."  
"Oh. Right." He talked with a sense of sarcasm, mostly because he didn't believe that was what I was doing; we both knew that he was just as afraid of monsters as I was. "Well, I have to hit the sack. We tigers need extra sleep to ensure our fighting instinct is at its best." He began to soften up my bed by pulling the sheets from their seams with his hook- shaped claws. Mom blamed me every time for ruining my bed , her theory being that I cut it up with scissors or something, and never once took into account that it could have been Hobbes. "Don't keep me up looking for monsters."  
I waited until I was sure that he was asleep, listening for his tiger- esque snores. Afterwards I took the box back from under the bed and took out the key, having found that it was slightly more addictive than just any other object. Incalculable time passed for me, as time was not a factor upon entering the 'world' that I could see just gazing into its beauty.  
I had a big day tomorrow anyway, since it was Mom and Dad's tenth anniversary. Even without the key it had some importance, so I finally decided to get some rest. The key would be there tomorrow anyway, and going to sleep was the quickest way to dream about it.  
  
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Final Comments: A few extra things to say:  
  
Drop every idea you have at this moment of this story being another one of those dumb stories where Calvin and Hobbes find a mystical object and go on an adventure. The key isn't as mystical as it is made to seem, and the story is very serious and will become an angst; I already have all the chapters planned out.  
  
Some plot holes will pop up later probably, but rest assured they will be filled  
  
The plot is kind of dry now, yes, but like I said before it will get much better, so have a little faith. 


End file.
